Thoughts on the media and where we are now

We have been discussing the position of the media within the present world stage and the impact they have in creating a media event in the manner they want the world to subscribe to, not truly reporting the facts in an unbiased journalistic manner. I.e. a camp of red terrorist attack the blue armies from within their base of operations, a city, who in turn attack the terrorist in their stronghold, the city, and innocent civilians perish. The media responds by reporting, “Blue Army makes nighttime raid on city, many innocent women and children die.” Note, not one word of the terrorists attack is mentioned.

This is a simple demonstration, but proves the analogy I have been making of the media’s unfair, slanted and biased reporting methods, reporting what they want the world to see and read, not the events as they truly transpired. The sad commentary to our present day media and their one-sided “we shape the world” philosophy is they have crossed the line of reporting the news as they see it and in a factual and unbiased manner, to becoming the news themselves.

Another example of this statement would be The New York Times in the article fully describing America’s secret financial tracking program for combating terrorism. The resulting news story was not the national news, the New York Times was the national and international news, and they became the news, not the reporting of the story. Now instead of power in the people, the media is now power absolute, they have truly defined the analogy of, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely,’ Edward R. Morrow would be turning over in his grave with this knowledge.

Imagine for one moment we were in a time machine and instantly transported back to 1942, America had recently entered the war and it was rough road ahead. For an example we will say a national newspaper breaks a story of America secretly working on a nuclear weapon, the mother of all destruction, they were advised by the Roosevelt administration not to publish, they ignored and published their story. What do you think the outcome of this would have been? Putting it bluntly, the government would never have allowed the story to go to press, the equipment would have been shut down and the reporters and staff placed in custody. Harsh treatment you may feel, but it would have saved lives and events such as this occurred more times than discussed. The future of America and England was at stake, the lives of millions were at stake.

An interesting sidebar to my simple analogy, if any publication within America would have uncovered the story of our creating weapons of mass destruction, due to their integrity, it would have never been printed. That my friends, was journalism.

In closing, a large percentage of the people within America now find their news stories elsewhere, they have realized there are other, factual outlets to obtain the news, the blog community. We have become more than we imagined when we began writing our thoughts within personal web logs which manifested to “Blogs”, we have become a new outlet source of news for a new, well informed generation of people who rely on their portable media to assist them in their work, their play and entertainment, most of us fall into this category as well. Countless numbers of individuals are switching to our blogs for their news because they have come to trust what we are reporting, they enjoy what we interject and they relish interfacing with our blogs, interjecting a new slant and even new stories.

As I have said many times, it is a brave new world and when Aldous Huxley penned this fine insightful look into the future of society he could not have imagined what the ramifications would be. The torch is being slowly passed to us. It is now up to us to carry the banner of respected journalism and media print when we report something. Yes, we are bloggers, most in other professions, our majority untrained in journalism or finer writing skills, but that is in our favor as we can interject our thoughts, our feelings, our fears and hope and desires into a story because of this.

As far as the reporting of an actual story we may came across or one we have read, we must report in as it occurred in a fair and unbiased manner and we must remember to link our sources insuring we give credit to others writing to insure we maintain this respect. After all, there are many people who have come to trust not only our reporting, but our insightful perspective and commentary.